Disk CleanupWelcome to Disk Cleanup, our regular weekend column delving into the PCs of PC gaming luminaries. Come back every weekend to read a new interview, digging into the important questions, like “How tidy is your desktop?” and “What game will you never uninstall?””Starting to be able to use a PC was one of the signs that I was growing up,” says Xalavier Nelson Jr, founder and creative director of indie studio Strange Scaffold. The creator of games like El Paso Elsewhere and I Am Your Beast was first introduced to gaming via console, only occasionally playing Flash games on PC. “One of my first PC game memories is not the games I was allowed to play, but the games I wasn’t allowed to play, watching my dad play Battlefield 2 and Age of Empires on a desktop PC.”The first PC game to stick in Nelson Jr’s brain was Sid Meier’s Pirates!, the 2004 remake of the 1987 piracy simulator. “I think [it’s] one of the most perfect examples of what a sandbox game can be,” he says. “It’s not concerned about getting a single, polished nugget of gameplay in your hands. It’s trying to compile this wider picture of what it means to be a pirate every layer.”Starting his career as a journalist, Nelson Jr eventually moved into game development and founded Strange Scaffold, releasing its debut title—An Airport for Aliens Currently Run by Dogs—in 2017. Since then, Strange Scaffold has embarked upon an impressively prolific run of development,…
